‘Nuff Said

This gif I found on the Planetary Society’s website shows Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, mutually orbiting each other.

Their description says:

This animation contains 13 images taken over the course of one Pluto rotation between April 12 and April 18, 2015. During this period, New Horizons was roughly 110 million kilometers from Pluto. Stacking and deconvolution has been used to increase the resolution of the images over the raw data, revealing Pluto’s spotty surface. The brightness variations make Pluto appear lumpy, but it is actually round.

Stacking and deconvolution. Stacking means they took several pictures and put them all together, one on top of the other, to get a better composite. I understand that. I don’t know what deconvolution means. You can tell I’m not graphics person.

These mutually orbiting dots can tell us a lot.

For a grainy picture of two moving spots of light, this visualization actually gives us a lot of information. For instance, it shows us that Pluto is spotty. It takes about six earth days to rotate once on its axis. During that time, Charon orbits it several times.

But what immediately grabbed my attention is the way the little world dances with its moon.

We usually think of a satellite orbiting its primary. In this case, it would be Charon, the tiny dot, orbiting Pluto, the larger dot. But we’ve always known this is not really the case. The two objects orbit each other. More accurately, they both orbit their common center of mass (or center of gravity).

This is the principle that was first used to find extrasolar planets; and it’s still used, along with other methods.

Other star systems are so far away that we can’t really see the movement, but the Doppler effect is used to infer any wobble as the star moves toward us and away from us. As it moves toward us, the light is blue shifted a little; away from us, it is red shifted. A complex wobble could indicate more than one planet. This same measurement can often tell us how many planets there are, their approximate masses, and something about their orbits.

This is amazing, because a star is usually so much more massive than any planets orbiting it that the common center of mass will actually be inside the star itself. While the planets orbit in wide ellipses, the stars themselves just wobble very slightly like toy tops beginning to run down. This is often true of planet/moon systems as well. For this reason, until a couple of decades ago, it was commonly believed that we would never be able to detect this wobble. Now, of course, it is a routine–though time consuming–procedure. It can take years to observe enough doppler data to determine the number of planets in a system.

In the case of Pluto and Charon, this dance is visible to us because both objects are so near the same mass. (Back in the days when Pluto was a planet, they have even been referred to by some astronomers as a double planet.)

Neil DeGrasse Tyson is one of my heroes, ranking right up there with Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, and Richard Dawkins. Stephen Colbert interviews him in this wonderfully entertaining as well as informative video. When you’re ready to watch your next movie, watch this instead. You’ll be glad you did.

I sent the following email to a few of my family and closest friends a few minutes ago, and then I realized I should post it here, too. Just in case anybody decides to tune in here.

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Some of you will remember the original Cosmos TV series from 30 years ago or so, featuring Carl Sagan. Do you know there’s a new Cosmos series that began 3-9? (You may have already missed 2 weeks of it. I missed the first episode, but I assure you I will not miss any more if I can help it.)

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Sagan’s widow, Ann Druyan, has teamed up with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, head of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, to create this new 13-week series. Tyson hosts the show excellently. Maybe even better than Sagan did. I’ve had tremendous respect for Druyan since she worked with her husband on the original series, and I’ve admired Tyson equally for years. This new series uses up-to-date computer graphics and includes new information that Sagan could not, because nobody knew it then. Those of you who enjoy learning about the magnificent universe we live in will not want to miss it.

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Take your pick of several channels. It’s on Fox News and National Geographic; I get it on Public Television; and there are two or three more. It shows Sunday evening at 9 pm EDT. That’s 8:00 pm in Texas and — I guess — 6:00 pm on the west coast. (Sorry, Perry. I don’t know if it’s showing in New Zealand or not. I hope it is. Even you will enjoy it.) If you won’t be home, it is worth recording to watch later.

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Nope, they aren’t paying me anything to promote the show. I just think it’s that great.

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I am a lover of truth, which is found by a combination of common sense and the methods of science. These “methods of science” include observation, reasoning, testing the validity of one’s reasoning through experiments or further observations, communication with other informed people, and plenty of healthy skepticism. Without these things, there is no truth. There is only superstition. And this is the truth.